Darius Jones Trio
Firehouse 12
New Haven
Sept. 12, 2025
As the Darius Jones Trio’s first set of the evening was coming to an end on Friday, Jones was talking about a man who was an inmate at a prison in Mississippi and sang while he cut down a tree. Jones had a broader point to make.
“There is brilliance in every single one of us,” Jones said, looking around the room. “There is something brilliant in every single being.” And “either you move toward that light or you don’t.”
That simple, clear message helped kick off Firehouse 12’s fall season of jazz concerts in its Crown Street studio, and set the mood to close out an ecstatic night of music.
Saxophonist and composer Darius Jones is an innovator in the tradition of Black music, recording and performing prolifically. In August he appeared at the Newport Jazz Festival and played dates in Europe. On Thursday he performed at the Sound and Gravity Festival in Chicago before arriving at Firehouse 12. His latest releases have garnered notice in NPR, The New York Times, Pitchfork, and Jazz Journal. He has received numerous fellowships and residencies and these days is an assistant professor of music at Wesleyan University.
Jones was at Firehouse 12 with Chris Lightcap on bass and Jason Nazary on drums to present his most recent trio album, 2024’s Legend of e’Boi (The Hypervigilant Eye). As the liner notes relate, the album is the seventh installment in a projected nine releases in Jones’s Man’ish Boy epic, which started with 2009’s Man’ish Boy (A Raw & Beautiful Thing). “Legend of e’Boi serves as a larger creative vehicle for artistic exchange. This project is about Black mental health and healing from personal and collective trauma through therapy, community & creative expression.”
As Jones states in his bio, his music is “a confrontation against apathy and ego, hoping to inspire authenticity that compels us to be better humans.”
On Friday night, the trio ripped into “We Outside” without saying a word. Jones began with a three-note declaration that Lightcap and Nazary smashed into on the third note, and they were off. Lightcap and Nazary were tight together on a staggered rhythm somewhere between a walk and a strut while Jones sent a melody over the top, then made another musical statement. Lightcap and Nazary changed the texture of everything they were doing, as Lightcap pedaled a note on bass while Nazary rolled, building tension and releasing it in drips. Jones joined them for a third statement, and the mood changed again, becoming sparser, pensive, searching. Jones returned, a little more plaintive this time, and Lightcap and Nazary responded with urgency. As Jones became more assertive, Lightcap and Nazary stripped back more. The rules of “We Outside” were the same as they had been all along, but it was all becoming more concentrated.
Then the rules changed. Jones got more talkative on the saxophone, and Lightcap and Nazary hit a proper groove in three. It was now Jones’s turn to take center stage, musically speaking. He took a single idea and kept elaborating, teasing out its corners, finding pockets to expand into new ideas. His melodic sensibility got more abstract as Nazary turned up the heat. Jones found a fluttering figure that he then turned inside out. Now all the musicians were dialing in more and more energy. As the music reached a peak, Jones ended his statements conclusively, and Lightcap and Nazary responded in kind. The audience waited for a long breath before flooding the trio with cheers.
The second piece — “Another Kind of Forever” — featured another rule: this time Jones and Lightcap worked in unison to make their musical phrases, to which Nazary responded with energetic excursions on the drums. Nazary built tension with every foray, an effective introduction to the piece’s next phase, in which Lightcap and Nazary fell into a groove that wouldn’t have been out of place in a spy movie, sexy and insistent. It was a launchpad for Jones, and he ran with it, until the rhythm section suddenly replaced that groove with a lurching waltz that Jones peppered with an urgent, angular melody.
Throughout both pieces, all three musicians played with an expert balance of force and restraint. Each one always played strong and explored. Each one also made sure to leave plenty of space for the others to do the same. The result was a sound that felt clear and accessible, the conversation among the musicians, and between the musicians and the audience, sweet and true.
Jones then explained that their flight from Chicago had been delayed, so it was possible the playing was going to get “kind of nasty,” a line delivered with a drollness that caused a wave of laughter. He then announced the next tune was called “We Inside Now.”
“Let’s see if you can feel the difference,” he said.
Nazary and Lightcap began with their sparsest sound yet, over which Jones laid a mysterious melody, a late-night ballad. Lightcap then offered up a solo that was both lyrical and muscular, with Nazary adding delicate yet destabilizing details to the rhythm he held. Jones returned with an even smokier take on the melody he’d just played. Nazary and Lightcap then moved into a strut, over which Jones draped a languid melody. The energy ratcheted up, and Jones’s playing morphed into a screeching wail, emotional and vulnerable. The audience responded with applause in kind.
Jones introduced the last piece of the evening as being by Henry Simpson Wallace, “a man that lived, and worked, and existed. He breathed on this land that we call America.” He was an inmate at the infamous Parchment Farm penitentiary in Mississippi, and famed ethnographer Alan Lomax recorded him “while he was cutting down a tree.”
“I play this song because Wallace wasn’t a star,” Jones said. “He was not paid for this song. He was not compensated in any way. He was just captured,” and the recording “made a lot of money for Alan Lomax.” But Wallace’s performance was brilliant. “In that moment,” Jones said, “he manifested something beautiful. I play this song to shed a little light on him. He was a man that existed, and that Is beautiful and worth something.”
Lightcap began with a soft tremolo on one note, using a bow, and Jones played a strong melody against it, moving in and out of a slight dissonance, to great emotional effect. Nazary entered with stirring sounds, hovering between atmosphere and rhythm. They continued, trance-like. First imperceptible, then unavoidably, they turned up the intensity, until Lightcap was sending up waves of droves, Nazary was getting frantic, and Jones was playing sax like he was pouring every last breath he had into it. He drove the instrument over its own edge, made it conjure up wooden flutes, animal calls, a hurricane howling through dry branches. It was devastating and affirming; it was, as Jones promised, beautiful.
Firehouse 12’s fall jazz series continues through Dec. 19 at its concert space at 45 Crown St. Visit Firehouse 12’s website for its full lineup of shows.
